Osprey Island (4 page)

“Here,” Merle told her.

“No, but during the year,” said the girl.

“Here,”
Merle said again, her patience rapidly waning.

“People
live
here?” The girl seemed genuinely surprised.

“What do you think?” Merle asked. “You think it’s like Disney World? You think we shut down after Labor Day, pull the docks in out of the water, put a big tarp over everything and pack up and go home?” The girl listened, drunk and bleary-eyed. “Like this is some summer camp for assholes? And what am I? An actress? They pay me to dress like a waitress and pour beer!” Merle laughed loudly, and clearly to herself.

The first person Merle spotted when she arrived at Morey’s that night was her own son, sitting by the bar, drinking a Coca-Cola as though no one knew why he carried his drink with him out to his truck or what he added to it there.

“Hi, Ma.”

“Lance.” Merle nodded. She poured herself a shot of tequila, drank it down, and chewed a lime. Lance glared disapprovingly. “Save it,” Merle told him. He turned back to the Irish girls who swirled around the pool table, carrying their cues like scepters. Merle didn’t know the redhead approaching the bar, but Lance practically jumped out of his skin offering drinks, offering anything. Brigid accepted a beer— Guinness, two of them, actually, both of which Lance paid for— thanked him, and then stepped away.

“You can’t let them know,” Merle told her son.

“Huh?”

“They don’t want to know—ones like that—how bad you want them.”

“Shut up,” Lance said. He was watching Brigid, who handed one of the beers to a college boy skulking in the corner.

“Don’t tell your mother to shut up.”

“Well, shut up, then.”

They were quiet a minute, until Merle said, “So how’s Lorna these days?”

Lance looked at his mother, then pushed his drink away. He shook his head, pulled the glass back, and took a big swallow. “Drunk,” he said.

“Lorna,” Merle said, “or you?”

But Lance didn’t answer, just stared into his drink, shaking his head no.

Brigid had run into Gavin, the waiter she had her eye on, that afternoon behind the staff barracks where he’d sat, smoking, on the fire escape steps. “A gang of us are planning to head over this evening to Morey’s Dinghy, that pub, there . . .”—she pointed—“at the end of the beach, you see?” Gavin had nodded, holding smoke in his lungs, never saying a word. But he’d come, and though he didn’t look particularly thrilled to be there, he seemed the sort who never looked particularly thrilled about anything at all. He didn’t speak much either, which only fueled Brigid’s intrigue. He looked like someone who needed someone to talk to, and though he gave no outward indication that Brigid might be that person, his presence at the Dinghy had her feeling buoyed and hopeful.

She lost the game she was playing and retrieved her beer. Gavin hadn’t moved from his corner, where a corona of brightly colored Christmas lights clustered in the fishing net above his head. Brigid went to him. “Come outside and have a smoke, won’t you?” she asked.

Gavin exhaled a cloud of smoke through the side of his mouth.

“Come for a smoke
with me
?” she revised.

He smiled slightly, awkwardly, as though his face were unaccustomed to such contortions. Then he shrugged and followed her out the back door.

The deck, too, was lit by Christmas lights: pink, blue, red, yellow, green, strung along the wooden railing, reflected in the water below. Brigid sat and swung her legs over the edge of the dock. Gavin eased himself down beside her and offered a cigarette. She made a show of surprise at his gallantry, and he continued to oblige, making sure hers was lit before his own. Wind ruffled the swamp reeds, and they both looked quickly toward the disturbance as though it might offer a possible conversation topic. A gull flew up toward the moon, half full and ringed with haze. Neither of them thought of anything to say. They sipped their beers. They smoked their cigarettes. You had to be grateful for props at times like this.

Brigid downed her last sip of beer. “Did you love her, then?” she asked. They’d all heard—through a very short and swift grapevine— of Gavin’s decimated relationship with the island girl he’d followed from California. She’d dumped him on arrival.

“I thought so,” he said. The topic ran constantly through his head and needed no intro or segue.

“And now?” she prodded.

“I don’t know.”

He offered nothing more.

“So how long were you two a couple, then?” she tried.

“Since September.”

She nodded, as though she knew what that was like. In truth, Brigid hadn’t had a boyfriend in her life who’d lasted longer than three weeks. Most didn’t last twenty-four hours. She’d slept with three boys and had shared only so much as a postcoital meal with just one of those.

“Yeah,” Gavin said. “Yeah, well, it sucks. Pretty much end of story.” He shrugged again, slapped his palms against his thighs, pulled his legs in and stood. He hovered above her a moment as she gazed up at him.

“Would you be interested at all in getting involved with someone else, then?” she asked. She cocked her head. “Insofar as it might take your mind off things a bit?”

He laughed, a muffled snort, which was dampening but not unkind. When he spoke, it was gratefully. “Thanks, but I don’t think so.”

“You’re sure, are you?”

He laughed again. “No.”

“Well, I suppose that’s something, isn’t it?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think it’s something. I don’t know what it is.”

“Hmm,” she said.

“Yeah well . . .”

“Yeah . . .”

“I’m going to head out, I guess,” he said. “Hey, thanks for the beer.”

“No bother at all.”

“G’night” he told her.

“ ’Night, then,” she repeated, her voice forced and bright.

He turned away, walked down the steps and around the outside of the bar toward the Lodge.

Brigid sat a moment, looking at the water. And then all there was to do was go back inside and order another beer and shoot another game of pool, and so she did.

Five

HOW BLACK THE NIGHT THAT BLINDS OUR HUMAN HEARTS

Within the chalky prison-walls the infantile screams of the little
hawks could be heard as they pounded feebly on the shell.

—WILLIAM I. FINLEY, “Photographing a Hawk’s Nest”

LORNA SAT ON THE CABIN PORCH, awkward and misplaced in the morning sun. She wished the light were like the stiffness of a new pair of shoes, and she closed her eyes and tried to imagine breaking it in. The sun eddied orange beneath her eyelids. If it were always sunny, maybe she could stay. If the darkness never set in to her again, holding her sure and tight, if she never turned away from the sun, just stayed outside with Squee forever and never went back inside, where blankets were hung over the windows to keep the light from bringing into relief all that was wrong with the way they lived. Squee belonged in the light, an angel child—that blond head of his, that devil’s grin on an angel’s face, her boy. But she could already see how worry wore him down, worry over his mama, shut tight in the dark like her life depended on it. To stay with Squee in the sun she’d have to vow never to take another drink. Never look at Lance again, because Lance
was
darkness, and Lorna’s dream of light ended right with him.

Lorna pushed inside through the screen door, let it close behind her, and then shut the wooden door as well. It was hard to see inside the cabin. Sunlight edged the window curtains like it might burst through, blow the drapery to smithereens the way hurricanes shattered windows from the outside or fires burst them open from within. It seemed wrong to Lorna that a day could be both dark and light. If it was dark and stormy you could stay inside with all the drapes drawn and lie in bed and drink and play cards and watch a movie with your kid curled up on your lap, and the world wouldn’t seem like it wanted something from you. It was so much easier to be a person when it rained.

Lance was on the couch, and he called to her, “Baby . . .” and she went to him, drawn back to the safest, warmest place there ever was. No fight, no struggle. Falling into Lance took no effort at all. It was like being conceived again, going back to the place before you were born, before there was work to bring you into the world. Sometimes Lorna wished she’d been allowed to stay in the first womb she’d known. No birth, no adoption, just a quiet death there in the darkness, before all the trouble of life had begun.

“C’mere,” Lance said, and held his glass to her lips, and held her head while she swallowed. The whiskey was warm and burned through her, so it wasn’t that she’d won the fight or lost the fight, there just was no more fight. And, yes, there were chores to be done, but what did it really matter if she did them or not? What did the world really matter? Squee was OK, off with Roddy, and what did anyone in the whole fucking world want, really, except to be left alone, and no one could accuse her of not leaving everyone the fuck alone. This. This was all she really wanted, just this.

She curled in Lance’s lap, and he pushed his hand down into her pants, warm into warm, like everything was meant to be, Lance warm in her, his fingers reaching all the way up inside to the darkest place they could find, because that’s all Lance wanted too: more darkness than he could get on the earth. He wanted to crawl inside her, as she crawled inside him. She opened around him and he pushed into her, like he could travel forever until he was gone. She felt herself contract around him, reached up with her arms to encircle him, realized her cheek was resting in his lap. Sometimes she wondered how he still got hard, because she’d heard that drinking made you lose that, but he’d never lost the ability to push himself inside her, everything concentrated deep in the pit of her pelvis. The darkness was immense, and she could swim in it, feel it open up inside of her and around her, and when she came it bloomed bigger and her consciousness fell away.

When she woke Lance was standing with one hand against the wall, the other probing painfully at his bare foot, which he was holding off the ground. There was a pilled yellow blanket nailed over the window beside him, and he yanked it down so he could see better, Lorna wincing as the blanket crumpled to the floor and sunshine poured in through the window. Dust glowed in the air like evidence of infection.

“Put it back,” Lorna pleaded, hand shielding her eyes.

“There’s a fucking piece of glass in my foot.” Lance tested his weight on the floor, grimacing.

Lorna levered herself up to sitting. Her head hurt, as though she’d missed her coffee. She leaned on the arm of the couch and tried to push herself up, but she didn’t have the strength, so she rolled onto her stomach and slid her knees to the floor, then climbed from a kneel to standing. She went to the window, bent slowly to pick up the blanket, and tried to jab it over the nails in the window frame, but it hurt her arms and she sank back to the floor and pulled the dusty blanket over her head. The light shone through—false, hopeful yellow—and she shut her eyes against it.

Lance was gone when she woke again, later, to a couple of waiters shooting the shit on the staff barracks’ back stoop.

“You go to Morey’s last night?” one boy said.

“Dude, I didn’t get this hangover in my room.”

“Yeah, so who was out?”

“I don’t know—you know, everybody, the usual.”

“How ’bout that girl?”

“Which girl?”

“The Irish one—Brigid.”

“Yeah,
that
Irish girl, yeah, she was there. With Lance fucking pissing himself over her.”

“She was with
Lance
?”

“He wished!”

“He was hitting on her?”

“It was pretty sick.” The boy paused. “Pathetic, you know? I totally feel for his wife, you know? I mean, that’s fucked up.”

“She’s been here before?” asked the boy who’d stayed in.

“Who, Lorna?”

“No, no. Brigid.”

“Nah. Her sister was here last summer. Fiona.”

“She as hot as Brigid?”

“Nah. I mean, she was good-looking enough, but not the same way, you know?”

“Yeah . . .”

The boys were silent a moment, lost in their own private reveries on the hotness of Brigid.

“What do you think of her?” the new boy said finally.

“Who, Brigid?”

“Yeah.”

“Dude, she’s hot.”

“Like I’m blind!”

“I don’t know. She’s totally hot. But kind of prickly too, you know? Like she’s super smart or something. Kind of sneaky, sort of.”

“Yeah,” said the new boy, “you get the feeling, kind of, when you talk to her, like she’s listening kind of too carefully or something. Like she’s memorizing things or something.”

The other boy let out a long negative sigh, shaking his head and considering his reply as it slowly escaped. “Naaah,” he said, “I don’t think she’s
that
smart . . .”

They were quiet.

“Dude, you got another smoke?”

“Upstairs.” A moment later the door slammed.

Lorna lay in her house under the old dirty yellow blanket. It wasn’t anything she didn’t know, really, and nothing she hadn’t heard before. Nothing worse than she’d done herself. And still, it hurt. Because there was nothing in the world—even joy—that didn’t hurt.

ON THE LODGE PORCH THAT NIGHT, Peg and Jeremy sat off to themselves, away from the rest of the staff on the edge of the deck, their feet dangling. Squee and Mia were playing Ping-Pong at the table underneath the deck, and their squawks and cries of victory and defeat rushed up through the planking. Gavin was playing Spit with a waiter named Joe who didn’t talk much and seemed even less happy with where he was than Gavin. Brigid sat around a table with three guy waiters who were playing I Never and seemed thrilled to have a girl, especially Brigid, join their ranks.

“I never had sex with someone I worked with,” said one of the waiters, who looked fifteen and had probably never had sex with anyone at all. The group paused, collectively considering their own checkered pasts. Brigid was the only one to drink. Never mind that she hadn’t actually shagged the boy, only messed about with him once at a party somewhere. But
these
boys didn’t need to know that. Brigid liked how impressed they looked, all agog at a girl who’d freely tell them whom she’d fucked and how. She liked that she could look down on them now: so immature to be impressed the way they were.

The next boy took his turn and upped the ante. “I never had sex with my boss.” He had on a pink Lacoste shirt and looked to be feeling mischievous.

Again, Brigid drank alone. The boy whom she hadn’t actually shagged hadn’t actually been the boss, only a coworker, but Brigid felt a sense of obligation to give these boys something to fuel their little dreams.

The third boy said, “I never watched someone else having sex.”

Brigid turned to him, coy. “Does that include the person you were having the sex with then? Like:
I never kept my eyes open
?”

The guy laughed. “I never watched two
other
people, who were not me, having sex,” he said.

“Live?” Brigid asked. “Or pornography as well?”

“Live,” said Lacoste boy.

No one drank.

“All right, then,” Brigid said, “so I’ve got to think up something I
haven’t
done, is that right?” She pretended to be racking her brain.

“Don’t tax yourself,” said the boy in the pink shirt.

“I’ve got it: I never rented pornography,” Brigid said. All the boys drank, and she laughed at them and they laughed back.

By the time the game broke up there were at least ten of them playing and Brigid was plastered—there were actually
plenty
of things she hadn’t done, involving all manner of relatives and root vegetables, that she was all too happy to admit to never having done. Jeremy and Peg, who were clearly about to become the new staff lovebirds, had gone for “a walk on the beach,” and there was much speculation among the rest of the group as to what that meant. Gavin had made his way over from the card game and sat in a chair just behind Brigid, close enough that she could feel him shift and sigh, not close enough that she was sure he’d done it deliberately. She liked the feel of him close to her. He was driving her a bit insane. She liked that some. Not too much. But some.

“YOU THINK I DON’T KNOW, LANCE? You make an ass of yourself— you think I sit here with no fucking clue?”

“You talked to my mother?”

“I never talked to your mother. I don’t talk to your damn
mother.
”

“So what the fuck are you talking about?”

“You come in blasted out of your fucking mind, three in the morning . . . You think Squee doesn’t hear? You think I don’t know what you’re doing?”

“What am I doing? You tell me what I’m doing. Waking up your goddamn
baby
?
Oh! Oh!
” Lance threw his hands in the air, his voice high and squeaky.
“Oh, don’t hurt my baby!”

Lorna looked as if she might strike him, but then she sank down to the table and buried her head in her hands.

Lance’s body released. He went to kneel by her chair, pushed his face into her lap, his cheek against her leg. “Baby,” he said, “Lorna.”

She let one hand fall to his head, ran her fingers through his hair, soft, greasy at the scalp, but so soft for a man, softer than anyone would think. “Go,” Lorna said quietly, “just go. Fuck whoever you want. Just go.”

“I didn’t fuck anybody.”

“Sure you did,” she whispered to the table.

“No I didn’t.” He opened his mouth on her thigh below the seam of her shorts. “I didn’t.”

“Why?” Lorna was crying now. “Why not?”

“I love you, Lorna Vaughn.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters,” he said.

She shook her head.

“Don’t talk stupid, Lorna.”

“What do I care anyway? Fuck them . . . all those girls . . .”

Lance lifted his head abruptly, his demeanor changed again, his face accusing and hurt, a shield of defense shot through beneath his skin. “Why?” he demanded. “You guilty about something, Lorna? Maybe it’s you we should be talking about now? Who’s the one who goes and fucks whoever she goddamn pleases? You tell me that, Lorna. Who’d you go and fuck this time? Find yourself a waiter? What were
you
doing last night? Want to tell me that?” He stood and backed away haltingly, as if suddenly repulsed.

Lorna didn’t move, didn’t lift her head. She just stayed there face-down at the kitchen table in their shack by the Osprey Lodge, her arm wet with tears, her nose dripping on her arm, her head stuffed so full she couldn’t breathe, just let the snot and tears run down her, too afraid to lift her eyes. It was dark outside, but the overhead light above the table was on, and she heard Lance turn from her in disgust, stride away, across the room toward the door. She wanted to call out, to ask him to please put out the light, but she couldn’t. She tried, her head down, eyes shielded—“Please . . .”—but the slam of the screen door cut her short, his feet heavy on the porch steps as if damning each one as he went. Then she was alone under the glare of the kitchen light. All she could think was that she would stay there with her head down until it burned out on its own.

JEREMY AND PEG HAD RETURNED from their walk on the beach and were wending their way slowly back toward the staff barracks. They climbed the stone steps on the path between the laundry shack and the Squires’ cabin and had stopped to kiss awhile on the cobbled path when, from inside the Squires’ cabin, they heard the shouting. Peg broke away first, startled. Jeremy turned his head toward the cabin and in the same motion pulled Peg to him—away from the noise of a husband and wife, a mother and a father, yelling
fuck you
for everyone to hear—as though spending the better part of the evening with their tongues in each other’s mouths had served to designate him as her protector. Peg strained against his grip and craned toward the cabin, then ducked back when, a minute later, the front door flew open and Lance charged out, swearing to himself. Peg hid there under Jeremy’s wing and stayed very quiet until Lance had passed, tearing off toward the Lodge. Peg and Jeremy stood, stunned. Then Peg looked up to Jeremy, his face a good foot above her own.